Monday, May 22, 2017

The Final Solution: Trump's Tweets and Black Holes

the black hole, Cygnus X-1 (NASA)

It’s interesting to note that while you’re going about your
business, perhaps waiting for the next gaffe from The White House or anxiously
waiting to hear whether the proposal for your project will get the green light
from your purveyor of choice, that there are bits and pieces of matter moving toward
the event horizon of some distant black hole where they will be sucked into
oblivion by an almost unimaginably powerful magnetic force that makes the
gravitational pull of the earth pale by comparison. Thinking about such things
can be like escapist entertainment, especially when the realities of everyday
life don’t present a particular pleasing palette of possibilities. One recourse
from a competitive dog eat dog world can be to look at everything under the
aspect of eternity. From this perspective mankind is just a speck, a minor
footnote in the 13.8 billion years since the advent of the Big Bang. Imagine
matter being sucked into a black hole and then imagine the fate of Trump’s
Tweets swirling into nothingness like the heroin swirling down the toilet in
that famous scene in Trainspotting.
Go out one clear night this summer. If you are lucky you will see shooting
stars or meteors raining through our galaxy. The point isn’t only that we’re
small and insignificant by comparison, it’s Hamlet’s old saw, “There are more
things in heaven and earth, Horatio/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy…”
It’s very hard to see the wood from the trees when you’re in the middle of a
tornado, but when everything settles down, you begin to get a glimpse of an
enormity that often eludes perception.

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.